There Are No Morals in Biology; There Is Only Expedience

There is no such thing as moral or immoral biology. Biology is well done, or badly done. That’s all. And genetic engineering is a great way to do it well.

Microorganisms, especially bacteria and yeasts, are perfectly suited for modifications to cheaply create all the compounds that the industry needs to supply us with the conveniences and
must-haves that we value so much today... and that we will value even more in the future! It is the way to go. We should use microorganisms for our own personal gain.

This has been done since decades and yet has not been taken far enough. For us, microorganisms produce essential vitamins that we eat every morning with your cereals,
antibiotics that already have or, at one point, will save your life, hormones that allow for the top-performances in sports that we all root for, medically
important proteins such as insulin, which was by the way the first protein produced by bacteria for medical use, vaccines, enzymes, and
countless other compounds…

Microbes are constantly modified with transgenic technologies to produce new bioactive molecules. And it is easy. They are good in incorporating foreign DNA and are literally
predestined to be utilized for the production of essential and useful compounds, ideally from inexpensive and renewable substrates that are available in almost unlimited supply.

Let microbes clean up our stupidity

We can use microbes to clean up oil spills. Oil spills happen quite frequently; daily on a low scale, but also on massive scales in the ocean. Remember BP's disastrous oil spill
in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010?

The recently investigated marine bacterium Alcanivorax borkumensis was found to use hydrocarbons as substrate. It accumulates in areas of high concentration of oil compounds. The observed natural
degradation of oil spills has been partly attributed to A. borkumensis. The bacterium’s enzymes, especially hydroxylases, are outstanding due to their high effectiveness and versatility.
The crude enzyme extract was shown to efficiently remove benzene, toluene and xylene (Kadri et al., 2018). Genetic engineering could increase its efficiency of degrading petroleum
products in soil and in water. Eventually, its application could immensely reduce environmental pollution and do humankind a great service.

Microbes for the production of therapeutics and vaccines

Modified microbes are used to produce therapeutic agents and are increasingly important for the development of new treatments. For instance, part of the artemisinin production that is used
against the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum (killing approximately 1500 people a day) is done in transgenic yeast. The genetically engineered
yeast (with genes from Artemisia annua) produces artemisinic acid that is then converted into artemisinin (semisynthetic process) (Kung et al., 2018). By optimising the metabolic
processes in yeast and industrial fermentation, it is expected to reduce the current production costs significantly and, thereby, producing artemisinin in a quicker and much more sustainable way.

Synthetic biology is also used for vaccine research. Here, synthetic genes offer the advantage to work on a vaccine without the need to handle the pathogen.

Meat for Vegans

Meat without animals is also on the horizon! Today, livestock is a major producer of greenhouse gases, requires an enormous amount of land and antibiotics, and produces a lot of waste. But we
can’t live without meat. So scientists set out to cultivate animal cells in bioreactors to produce poultry meat and beef (Reisinger and Clark, 2018; Sharma et al., 2015;
Pandurangan and Kim, 2015). So vegans can look forward to finally eating animal-free meat.

The potential is sheer limitless

Spider silk that is stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar and even lighter than carbon fibre can be produced by bacteria such as E. coli and yeast in large volumes. Even the
attachment of other molecules to change certain properties of the silk has been done and resulted in its use for clothing, medical applications, and as cosmetic
ingredient (Spiber Inc., AMSilk GmbH) (Edlund et al., 2018).

Synthetic biology is mainly used in microorganisms, but plants can also be augmented. Here, specifically oxygenic photosynthesis is an attractive area for
enhancement, since only approximately 40% of the solar energy is used by plants. Optimisation by genetic engineering could lead to increased plant biomass and crop yields (Leister, 2018).

In fact, researchers become designers and builders of biology by using de novo synthesised double-stranded DNA. We at Eurofins Genomics de novo synthesise any
double stranded DNA sequence that you need with almost no limitations for nucleotide sequence and size, and this super-fast! We make time your best friend and that for unbeatable
prices.

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